"Great and Terrible" - A Marriage Poem

“Yet great and yet terrible,”

Says the wedded pair of one,

“To shave fat off the soul,”

Golden results of their legal union.

The brightness exudes from the blissful speech

Which attends the everyday musings of both,

And the living and sleeping and eating together,

Better characterized as continual oath.

Our ears, my wife’s and mine, listen close,

As these two wonder-working old-ones speak true,

Kindly, gently giving their humble boast

Of their own manifestly-old love, still quite new.

“We see and hear and touch one another,

Shedding from each the weights of monas,

We come from each end of the other,

We fulfill our damaged lives’ telos.

“Destruction, of course, is a needed requirement

-they should know so let’s tell them the truth-

Of the closeness that epitomizes both your retirements,

How much you must die to come and pass through.”

The love you see in all of the aged,

Of a quiet, content, and measured sort,

Was not given but steadfastly earned

So the husband and wife could be of one heart.

The giving and taking and all of the gripe,

Must give way entirely if you are to pass,

Into the arches of true, sustainable love,

The love which stays, cries, dances, and laughs.